Thursday, May 01, 2014

This article is written in Englsih and Portuguese (original version here)
Este artigo está escrito em Inglês e Português (versão original aqui)

English version
The Informix world should be focused on the IIUG annual conference taking place in Miami. But the world doesn't stop spinning and possible important news for Informix come from other locations and origins.
Last week IBM announced it's new version of the Power CPU. That's the new Power8, an impressive beast with 12 cores, 8 threads per core etc. But why am I touching this subject on an Informix blog? Because besides this latest evolution that naturally brings much more capacity, IBM have been doing some interesting actions regarding the Power architecture... Sometime ago, IBM opened up the design of this technology and created the OpenPower foundation. This allows other companies to produce chips and be involved in the future of the platform. This companies include heavy hardware users like Google, mobile market giants like Samsung, software (Linux) partners like Canonical (Ubuntu) and chip makers like Nvidia. This effort seems able to generate some interesting results. Among them we have Google showing a Power8 based motherboard on IBM's Impact 2014 conference. There are already partners building Power machines. And some features of the new processor were influenced by this:

PowerKVMKVM is a kernel based virtualization layer. The Power systems were already able to run Linux LPARs but they need to have IBM's PowerVM underneath (the IBM Hypervisor). Now it's possible to have just the hardware, then PowerKVM and Linux VMs on top. All in an OpenStack compliant system

Little Endian LinuxEndianess has to do with the way long words/words etc. are organized in memory. There are two flavors depending on whether the higher byte/word (most significant) is stored before or after the lower part (least significant). For us, simple users this seems an irrelevant techie thing... and in part it's true. But it's highly important when you think about porting applications and specially data.RISC systems (AIX, HP-UX - PA-RISC, Solaris Sparc) etc were created Big-Endian. Linux on Intel is Little-Endian. Linux on Power was Big-Endian.With Power8, the OS may decide the mode. And IBM and it's partners are working on Little-Endian Linux for Power.

The last point is where I wanted to reach.... The implications of this shift are huge. If you check the link above on Google+ where a Google engineer shows the Power8 based motherboard, it says the board was created "to port our software stack to POWER (which turned out to be easier than
expected, thanks in part to the liitle-endian support in P8)". But this may have more implications and I'd like to raise one: In the past we've seen one OS (HP-UX) move from one platform (PA-RISC) to another (Itanium). At that time Informix/IBM did something that never repeated itself again: We issued a note stating that customers making this move could back up their PA-RISC systems and restore on Itanium servers. Further more it said that customers could have their primary HDR server on PA-RISC and their HDR secondary servers on Itanium. I suppose we all agree this means or translates into a very smooth transition or migration path. And it was possible because the platform endianess didn't change. For pre-Power8 systems, if you wanted to move an Informix instance from Intel Linux to Power Linux you'd have to export and import. With Power8 I believe this could be possible by simply backup/restore or by means of HDR/RSS setup. Note: This is my personal thought... nothing along these lines was announced and I have no internal knowledge about any plans to do so (neither would I share them before official announcement of course). I'm just mentioning this because I think this could be a very interesting topic for Informix customers to discuss with IBM. And since some of them have joined IIUG's conference I leave it as food for thought.

Final note

One of the best things about writing this blog is that it forces me to do some (or sometimes a lot) of research about the topics I'm writing about. In particular I like to see what's happening on the competitors field. This time I ended up on an Oracle blog post about Power8. As you'd expect they don't have nice things to say about this, and that's always interesting reading (as the good things are easy to find on IBM's side). But I feel sad and sorry when there are no good arguments on "the other side". Just to highlight a few examples:

This sentence "IBM seems to be re-aligning POWER8 to cover lost ground since it decided
to de-invest in x86 entirely, while Oracle has instead adopted the
strategy of adding/building value for enterprise environments and adding
functionality to enhance customer experience (our software in silicon
with SPARC processors, Oracle Solaris enhancements and Engineered
Systems as examples)" confuses me... Is the author referring to the "engineered systems" like Exadata which actually are made of "their software", on Intel's hardware?!

The author says "IBM delivered only two POWER updates in the last four years". That's more or less the truth if you consider major upgrades which is a normal cycle for hardware. But then it says "Oracle increased investment in SPARC and Oracle Solaris delivering five
generations of SPARC processors in four years, and doubling performance
with each release". Hmmm... so it's now 10x faster than it was in 2010. There goes Dave House's tweak on Moore's law. And if that's so, why are they loosing market share and using Intel processors on Exadata? At least IBM uses Power CPUs on our flagship "product" Watson!Actually Oracle released T3 (September 2010), T4 (September 2011) and T5 (March 2013). T3 and T4 were already on Sun's roadmap.

The author points to a roadmap where the next releases are marked for 2015, 2017 and 2019. Roughly every two years... exactly what is criticized about IBM's Power last 4 years. Point taken! :)

My point regarding the above post is simply that CPU battles have always been a leap frog game. IBM is currently in the lead, Intel will answer, next Sparc (2015) may have something to say and so on... And each vendor will show it's strengths and it's up to the competitors to show possible weaknesses. But if anyone wants to argument, it's better to use good arguments. And that's clearly not the case here. And it's a fact that IBM is doing things differently with the OpenPower foundation and the third party collaboration. Market and time will tell us the results.

About Me

I'm an IBMer and I've been working with IDS since I joined Informix in 1998.
The ideas and opinions expressed in this blog are personal and in no way represent IBM positions, strategy or opinions.
I chose to write this blog in English so that I could reach the maximum number of Informix users. Take notice that English is not my native language, so there are probably many mistakes.
I appreciate any comments, corrections and topic sugestions.
I can be reached at domusonline at gmail dot com.